On Traveling Zoos Part 1: Moving to Chicago

Folks, this is a long one, to be sure, so let's do this in installments.

Dinner conversation can be difficult. Whether it’s with an old spouse, a new girlfriend, or moving to a new town, we seem to have certain standards for introductory conversation, the most famous being “So, what do you do?” I’d like to offer another alternative, one that simply requires changing the tense. Go with “What have you done?”- It’s astounding what people have done with their past lives. The history teacher I worked with used to travel with a Serbian dance troupe, an old roommate, now a PhD candidate in public health, used to be a tour guide at Kellogg’s cereal factory, the computer programmer, a friend of a friend, toured bars across America organizing put-put golf competitions for Bass Ale. Now that I’m a public school teacher, my students are always a little shocked that I was a musician in a former life. But, well, a lot of people are musicians, depending on how loosely you define the term. It’s really not that uncommon. I don’t like to brag, but I think I can safely say that most people have never been an animal handler at an urban traveling zoo.

I have to offer first that I never expected to do this. I never had any real inclination to touch animals when I was a kid-I inherited my Indian father’s cobra paranoia, applied irrationally to the harmless garter snakes that inhabit most of Michigan. Nor did I ever voluntarily collect bugs. I love biology, but from a safe distance. I am the armchair quarterback of naturalists. Actually touching animals started when I moved to, oddly enough, Chicago.
For a suburban kid, moving to a major metropolitan area can be difficult. I used to date an Indian woman from Bombay, now in nationalistic lingo “Mumbai”, and when I moved to Chicago, I stayed with her while I searched for a job, a place to live, etc. Predictably, after about a month of sharing her apartment, her food, her leisure time, private time and sleeping time, she got a little distraught. I’m half-Indian, but the fact of the matter is I grew up in white suburban Detroit, raised on Sesame Street and Spaghettios. Still, given our common ancestry, I thought it prudent to use an argument forwarded by Salmaan Rushdie on an NPR interview, hoping our cultural overlap to a fellow desi might hold some sway. The thrust of his argument was that it easier to move from one metropolitan center anywhere in the world to another than it is for a small town kid to move to the City, as-even though moving from Bombay to Chicago is disconcerting- one still has the ability and knowledge to negotiate metropolitan living- public transport, crime, sprawl, neighborhoods and affiliations, all that stuff. It was a valid observation on Mr. Rushdie’s part, but a total bullshit excuse on mine to use it as a reason why I hadn’t found a job, and it had the convenient logical extension that of course I couldn’t move out of her place until I had a job to pay for one of my own, and how could I do that when I needed time to adjust, blah blah blah. What charlatan I was. Or, maybe just a little overwhelmed- I was young, the city was huge, I was a little scared, to be honest. If Judge Judy were here, though, she’d just call me an asshole.

I had come to Chicago with the intention of working in education of some form. I had been a camp counselor in Michigan and had taught test-prep classes for the SAT and ACT, and found that they, as jobs, were much more tolerable than pouring coffee at the Rotary Club luncheon every Wednesday for years on end. I was determined to find something at least related to education, and was extremely diffident about taking a food service job. I flipped through the Reader classifieds every day, until one particular ad caught my eye. The ad read something like this:

WORK FOR A TRAVELING ZOO. Assistant animal handlers needed for traveling animal show. We tour schools, after-school programs, private parties, etc. No experience necessary, teachers and educators encouraged to apply.

I had been in Chicago for over a month at this point, and I was sort of desperate for a job. My parents had shelled out a lot of money for a swanky biology degree at the U of M, and I had repaid their forethought and kindness by deciding I was going to be a rock and roll star. Also predictably, this didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped, and I found myself slumming around Ann Arbor after the band broke up. The problem with hanging around the ole college campus is that, while you have a “prestigious” degree, so does the guy at the tollbooth, the gas station attendant, and most of the meter maids. The waitress at the Fleetwood Diner had double masters’ degrees in anthropology and comparative literature, but could only pay her rent slinging French fries and corned-beef hash to drunken bar-flies at 3 o’clock in the morning. I tried a few lab rat jobs, but they invariably paid less than waiting tables, plus they had the additional detractor of working with neurotoxins, something you couldn’t be drunk to do, as opposed to bartending at weddings. These jobs had early hours, low pay, and of course were, as a rule, stone-cold boring. One job, working for OSHA-that being the Occupational Safety and Health Administration- required me to dry and weigh soil samples from a landfill for PCB’s. It sounds sort of nifty and important, but it really amounted to drying and weighing soil samples all day. The only exciting thing I remember in my three-month tenure was when the janitor watched my colleague taking the samples out of the dessicator- this being scientific nomenclature for ‘dryer.’ It was basically an expensive and rather ineffective oven.

“So, you done cooking your dirt?” she asked.

“It’s SOIL.” He was flipping out a bit.

“Looks like dirt to me”, She said. It looked like dirt.

“DIRT is what is found underneath fingernails. It’s soil, dammit, SOIL. Don’t you get it?!?”


Scientists can be a little uptight. Water is also wet.

It was winter when I started the job, and I got to the lab just before the sun rose. The lab had no windows, and I didn’t finish until just after the sun set. I used to eat lunch in my car, if only for the opportunity to photosynthesize for 45 minutes. The job paid $8.50 an hour, a dollar more than any of the lab rat jobs I held previously. The Wendy’s across the street was hiring night-shift managers at $9.00. I felt it was time to move to a better job market. Like the rest of Michigan, I moved to Chicago.

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